The first time Oliver saw him, he felt it—an ache, ancient and impossible, curling around his ribs like an old melody half-remembered.

The man was walking down the street, slow and aimless, like he had nowhere to be and no one waiting for him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a long coat that did little to hide the way he carried himself—like someone who didn’t belong here, or anywhere. His silver-gray eyes never met anyone’s gaze, staring past the world as if it were something he had already seen and lost.

Oliver should have kept walking. He didn’t talk to strangers, let alone ones that looked like they had stepped out of a storybook. But something about this man didn’t make sense.

Maybe it was the way the wind stirred his hair, moving through it like invisible fingers. Maybe it was the way the light hit his skin—not quite reflecting, not quite absorbing, as if it didn’t know what to do with him. Or maybe it was his eyes. Eyes that, for one impossible second, flickered with something not human.

Oliver’s breath caught.

He had spent his whole life searching for proof that there was something more—something real beneath the dull, gray world he lived in. He had dreamed of creatures with wings, of things that did not belong, of men who carried forgotten magic in their bones.

And now, there he was.

Lost. Wandering. Waiting.

Oliver clenched his hands into fists to stop them from shaking.

If he let this moment pass, if he let this man disappear, he would regret it for the rest of his life.

So he took a breath, stepped forward, and said, “Hey. I think I know what you are.”